ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer's Notebook

Chapter 7. Profiles

Personalizing your web site is a way to enhance the experiences of your users. Personalization allows information about visitors to be preserved so that the information can be reused when they come to your site again. For example, Amazon.com uses personalized information to remember the books and DVDs that you have purchased and to make suitable recommendations based on your interests.

Figure 7-1. Amazon.com’s personalized recommendation

Personalize Your Application

Note

Use the Profile object to remember your users’ preferences.

Chapter 5 introduces the new ASP.NET Membership Provider and shows you how to use it to manage users easily. Using the new Membership Provider makes managing user logins straightforward. However, the membership feature does not store information about the users it lists, such as their preferences for themes, their shipping addresses, or lists of previous purchases.

To remember a user’s preferences, you can use the new Profile service (exposed via the Profile object) in ASP.NET 2.0. Think of the Profile service as a mechanism to persistently store a user’s information, similar to the Session object. Unlike a Profile object, however, a Session object is valid only for the duration of a session; after the session has expired, the Session object is deleted. The Profile service, however, retains its information until you explicitly remove it ...